It’s smart to not read too much into a byelection result, but you can read things if you know where to look.

For instance, if you pick through the entrails of any byelection you’ll eventually find a sodden and disgusting note that says the first lesson is to not read too much into a byelection. You may angrily throw that note away.

The second lesson from this byelection is that if you live by personality politics, you die by it too.

No one will ever know how much it hurt the Liberals in Calgary-Centre when it was revealed that Justin Trudeau suffered from a debilitating case of Alberta-phobia. It’s a disease that is so serious it can cause the victim’s “alleged” anti-Alberta remarks to be “taken out of context” before said victim ends up apologizing for his or her alleged and out-of-context remarks.

As one of Canada’s leading, though unlicenced, epidemiologists I note that the disease had spread through the Liberal ranks with David McGuinty clearly being patient zero.

Anyway, the important political lesson is that when you invest your entire party’s future in a winning personality, at some point he or she will run into a serious question that will not succumb to an impish grin.

That’s what happened to Justin and when it happened to him it happened to the entire Liberal party because right now all they have is Justin, a faded brand and whole bunch of rusting Michael Ignatieff campaign buttons telling us to “Rise Up!” which we refused to do.

But the lessons don’t end there. Entrail pickers can divine many others but if I had to pick one, it is that the environment is an issue. Sure it’s tempting to write off the Green surge in Calgary and Victoria as a kind of hippie revolt. But that doesn’t take into account that hippies don’t revolt because there’s too much work involved.

Anyway, the Conservatives need a positive environmental message that reflects the legitimate belief that the environment must be protected with the equally important belief that the wood sprites and fairies will not magically create jobs just because we protected their sacred grove of old growth forest.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Conservatives have a ready audience for that message, given how many of their present and potential supporters work and play in the great outdoors. In Calgary-Centre they are the folks who work downtown for an oil company while hiking on the weekend in the Rockies. Elsewhere, they farm. They hunt and fish and they own cottages at the lake. They very kindly produce the oil so that the people who oppose oil and gas production can car pool down to the protest rally.

And yet the Conservatives have made strides creating several new national parks, protecting hundreds of thousands of acres through the Nature Conservancy and tough new emission standards on cars and electricity generation. But for reasons I don’t understand they don’t aggressively tell that story.

They also have much more to do.

Most importantly, they need to show they care as much about the environment at least as much as their supporters do.

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Tories’ story on environment not told

It’s smart to not read too much into a byelection result, but you can read things if you know where to look.

For instance, if you pick through the entrails of any byelection you’ll eventually find a sodden and disgusting note that says the first lesson is to not read too much into a byelection. You may angrily throw that note away.

The second lesson from this byelection is that if you live by personality politics, you die by it too.

No one will ever know how much it hurt the Liberals in Calgary-Centre when it was revealed that Justin Trudeau suffered from a debilitating case of Alberta-phobia. It’s a disease that is so serious it can cause the victim’s “alleged” anti-Alberta remarks to be “taken out of context” before said victim ends up apologizing for his or her alleged and out-of-context remarks.